Roots
Tomorrow is another day
Deepti

Well-known sentences and phrases, especially those associated with famous people, are known as catch phrases. These phrases can originate from films, television programmes or bestsellers. Once they gain some popularity, they quickly spread through mass media. In today’s shrinking world, catch phrases do not remain restricted to the society of origin, but quickly spread the world over. The sheer variety and efficiency of mass media has been very kind to catch phrases. The catch phrase is often used synonymously for the word ‘meme’ as well. In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ from the Greek mneme, which means ‘memory’. Dawkins used ‘meme’ to denote the building blocks of cultural evolution and used tunes, fashions and catch phrases as examples. Catch phrases can often succinctly sum up the essence of an era or time, as seen in the ‘India Shining’and ‘Feel Good’ catch phrases. It would be safe to call Chak De the catch phrase of India, 2007.

With the new year around the corner, it seems apt to mention here the catch phrase ‘after all, tomorrow is another day’. The popularly used ‘tomorrow is another day’ took on another connotation with the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in 1936. The heroine says ‘after all, tomorrow is another day’ as the final words of optimism and belief at the end of the novel. After the film was released in 1939, this closing line became a catch phrase for any person caught in a difficult situation.

In the 1950s, advertising slogans originated in the US, and ever since, catch phrases have also been coming in from advertisements. The typical Indian English one from a burger chain ‘I’m lovin’ it’ may well catch on the world over. ‘Taste the thunder’ and ‘do the dew’ have caught the public fancy. When you say ‘what new year gift can I get for the man who has everything’, you use a catch phrase that comes from the advertising campaign of a watch manufacturer. This 1980 campaign asked, ‘ What do you buy/give the man who has everything?’

HOME